Staff: Mentor

NASA will detail a major science finding from the agency's ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 8:30 a.m. PDT (11:30 a.m. EDT) on Monday, Sept. 28. The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

8 a.m. PDT = 3 p.m. UCT = 5 p.m. CEST (Central European Summer Time)

The panel includes an expert for the HiRISE experiment, a high-resolution telescope in Mars orbit. Whatever they have, apparently images of some area are highly relevant.

One of the panel members is Lujendra Ojha, a PhD candidate. If they include him, it is very likely the discovery is directly connected to his work. According to his website:

One of my interest is understanding the formation mechanism of Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL). RSL are active features on Mars that might require flowing water. On Mars, they form and grow during warm seasons and disappear during cold seasons. They recur over multiple years in generally the same location. I use remote sensing instruments on board various Mars orbiting space crafts to understand their geological/hydrological nature. Additionally, I use data from CRISM onboard MRO to understand its formation mechanism.

Those structures are visible to HiRISE. Variations from year to year are not new. Did they see something in action?

Update: Very strong indications of liquid water on Mars - today. Spectroscopy of the RSL shows chemical compounds called perchlorates, and it is expected that they cannot form without liquid water.
This liquid water is probably very salty, which lowers its freezing point. It is unclear if life can survive the high expected salt contents.

I am adding a link to the upcoming live stream here, in case there are others who'd like to watch it on Sep 28, 8:30 a.m. PT :
Quote: "The event will also be carried live on: http://www.ustream.tv/NASAJPL"

Looking forward to whatever this is about.
After all, the presence of liquid water on the surface of Mars in the past is something which now seems indisputable.
Have they found something indicating possible life in the past?

As for conspiracy nuts, well somebody I was chatting with on another site a while ago thinks that the curiosity lander (and the previous ones) are 'government propaganda', and even the government itself is propaganda.
(They were not clear about which government they were referring to, apparently the government is the same guys everywhere on Earth.)
Everything is really being made up by a very small group of 'elites', whatever that is, who control every aspect of every kind of media which is just 'slush' planned to keep to the wider population dumbed down.

Not merely confirmation. Some very interesting implications:
1] We can finally begin to construct a possible mechanism for Martian life.
2] We finally know where to look for Martian Life.
3] The briny areas are on the sides of slopes - terrain that is very challenging for rovers to reach, but trivial for a spacesuited human.
4] We can send people to Mars and they will have resources to live.

Staff: Mentor

Even though R.S.L.s appear to be some of the most intriguing features on Mars, no one is likely to get a close-up look any time soon.

R.S.L.s are treated as special regions that NASA’s current robotic explorers are barred from because the rovers were not thoroughly sterilized, and NASA worries that they might be carrying microbial hitchhikers from Earth that could contaminate Mars.

The conditions there are considered to be too good for life to explore them with the current or upcoming rovers. Oh, the irony!
Humans would make the problem even worse, as we cannot sterilize humans or even humans in a spacesuit.

Staff: Mentor

The conditions there are considered to be too good for life to explore them with the current or upcoming rovers. Oh, the irony!
Humans would make the problem even worse, as we cannot sterilize humans or even humans in a spacesuit.

Who is protecting who from what, here? Is this some sort of NASA "Prime Directive"?

Who is protecting who from what, here? Is this some sort of NASA "Prime Directive"?

I have often heard NASA top people referring to the high importance of sterilising exploration craft to the greatest possible extent, so there is at least an implicit sort of 'prime directive' of non-interferance.
I believe the Cassini mission currently exploring the Saturn system will be intentionally crashed on to the planet when it's fuel is exhausted so that there is no risk of contaminating one of the moons.

The motivation for this however is very different to that of the star trek federation of planets directive, which was based in a moral-philosophical reasoning.
In the case of NASA and other missions the reason is more likely to do with not polluting so that future missions won't be producing false positive results.

Although spacecraft go through multiple cleaning steps to ensure that they bear no biological contaminants, previous reports suggest that Curiosity project developers did not follow these planetary protection protocols to the letter.

Not just live; with the presence of a wide variety of perchlorates, it raises the possibility of making solid rocket fuel for a return trip, or further deeper exploration without bringing fuel from home (Earth that is).